"Charlotte Jenkins describes her deep confusion as a 10-year-old after her father was accused of murder and says her memory is hazy." So said the newspapers last week as the 18-year-old stepped up to give evidence at her father's appeal. Siôn Jenkins was convicted eight years ago for the murder of his foster daughter, Billie-Jo.

The trauma behind Charlotte's ordeal is just about imaginable, but it was the words "hazy" and "deep confusion" that made my heart clench. Charlotte Jenkins was just 10 when she discovered the bloodied body of her foster sister. The events that followed not only obliterated her relationship with her father, but forced her to confront the idea that he was a killer. Hazy? Confused? I'm amazed she can recall a single second of that terrifying time.

My own trauma with my father - though scarcely on a par with Charlotte's - began when I was 15. Or at least I think I was, I think it did. Only recently have I begun to understand how my memories of that difficult time are warped and distorted or - even more perplexing - blanked.

When it comes to my father, all I have is a dark muddle, a clumsy mismatch of ill-fitting memories. It feels as if somebody wiped the tape. But what scares me is that somebody must have been me.

I was 12 when our mother left our father. Like so many divorces, theirs was bitter. But almost overnight - in fact literally, since my mother left at 4am with a removal van while he was away - he began actively to dislike me. My daddy, the genial, if un-engaged, man who'd always made me laugh, began to blame me. Why hadn't I stopped my mother going that night?

But what could I have done?

"You could have gone to a call box and rung me."

But it was the middle of the night. There wasn't one.

"You could have found one. Didn't you care?"

Did I care? Did I behave callously? Didn't I truly love my daddy? Wasn't I worthy of his love? Did I perhaps deserve the emotional punishments he devised for me every time I visited his new home? And did I deserve what came next? (He relinquished contact forever.) And after that? (He cut me out of his will.)

This confused and guilty dialogue looped around in my head for the next 25 years, only resurfacing in a concrete way once I had a 12-year-old of my own. And I thought I knew what had happened. It turned out I was wrong.

When I met my partner in 1986, I told him all about it - the difficult nights at my father's house, the tense days as I sat and he made me re-live the "night of betrayal". I told my partner - and I was telling the truth - that after O-levels, my father wanted to stop paying my school fees. But mum took him to court to enforce the terms of the divorce settlement and I had to write the judge a letter about wanting to do A-levels and he was forced to pay. From that time on, I told my partner, he refused to see me.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I rediscovered and read my (gawky, priggish, hilarious) 16- and 17-year-old's Letts diaries and found regular visits to my father. Difficult, tense, upset visits. Visits that culminated in him deciding not to see me any more. But that didn't happen straight after the court case as I had thought - it wasn't until 18 months later.

I read my loopy teenaged writing, astounded, unable to recollect the events it described. Here was more than a year of my life that I had blanked out. Not all of it, of course. I remember other things - the boys I fancied, the tennis I played, the striped top I bought at Chelsea Girl. But the bad bits had simply gone, sliding off the edge of my post-teenage consciousness.

It's been disconcerting to find that these past few years, as I entered my 40s and my three kids hit the ages of my pain (12, 13, 15) - that I've had to face up to all those lost weekends.

Flashes come to me out of nowhere: an angry and depressed man, an empty house, lonely Sundays, the nervy tension of wishing things would just be OK. My teenage diaries supply the other missing bits in the jigsaw of myself (And there I was, happily imagining that all I had to do was complete the circle of blue sky around the edge!). I do now want the jigsaw to be truly whole but I'm not sure it ever can be. Instead, I've had to accept that the story of my life which I'd told myself (and others) was flawed, full of "haziness" and yes "confusion", with great big sections missing, and - frustratingly for someone who makes her living telling stories - no easy endings.